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No mobility without interoperability!

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As mentioned in a previous post, I recently changed roles at Microsoft and joined a very impressive team in charge of what is called Interoperability Strategy.

As a new member of this team, I cover client platforms Interoperability (Windows Phone, IE, Windows 8 and therefore HTML5/CSS/JS). Ramping up on these topics and starting to explore the interoperability specifics, I am realizing how complex, vast and critical Interoperability is for mobility in the consumer and enterprise markets. Therefore I thought it would be a good idea for me to synthetize my findings and thoughts into a series of blog posts.

The teams’ charter is to engage with developers, customers and communities to help improve interoperability between Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies. The goal is to participate in and contribute to defining standards and implementing them. The team contributes into the development of cross-platform frameworks, develops prototypes and technical bridges and publishes white papers and code samples, and is at the forefront of many Open Source efforts at Microsoft. In addition, it helps product groups integrate better support for these standards into future products. Technical work done can be seen on the interoperabilitybridges.com website.

Projects the team has participated in recently and that you have certainly heard about are things like the following:

So we are looking into enabling particular scenarios such as the one that I am writing about today: mobile interoperability. The series of posts is not intended to deliver a magic response to all the questions you might have regarding mobility and interoperability. Actually you might end up with more questions than responses… which I think is good. The intent of this series is to help you identify what you may want to pay attention to when considering a mobile application development and introduce you to the nascent world of interoperability of the mobile ecosystem.

The series is made of the following 4 articles:

The last few years have totally changed how mobility is considered as it became critical if not central to a lot of products, services and solutions. Furthermore, given the actual fragmentation of the mobile market, I am convinced Interoperability is very important for every single player in the mobile field to get it right, whether they are software vendors, hardware vendors, services providers or simple developer.

So, I’ll dive into all this in the first post of the series, which I plan to publish early next week!